Debt briefs

Higher debt levels imply high debt servicing costs, reduced public spending, and capacity to deliver essential services. High debt service is incompatible with scaling-up spending on the SDGs. Evidence shows the positive impact of reducing external debt service to no more than 15% of revenue.

GRADE was used to analyse the potential if governments had additional revenue equivalent to their external debt service in 2024  (Debt Justice) for 121 countries, as a percentage of government revenue. The findings for all countries are summarised below, showing the sum of the numbers who would have access to critical services and the average percentage of those who currently do not have access. For example, on average, 18% of those without access to basic water would gain access if the external debt service were cancelled. We see that many millions would benefit from a reduction in external debt.

In this paper, An analysis of the impact of debt service on human rights, we answer the question of whether public and publicly guaranteed debt should be considered a human rights issue. We consider three scenarios: the impact on human rights of reducing government external debt service to 5%, 10%, and 14% of the government revenue in those countries where debt service is above these levels.
As debt repayment varies by year, we used the average debt service between 2022 and 2024 from the Debt Justice UK dataset (collated from World Bank and IMF sources), which includes external public and publicly guaranteed debt, IMF repurchases, and charges.

Select one of the three scenarios to see the potential for human rights at country level OR DOWNLOAD all data in EXCEL